A worthwhile read despite a simplification that might put some readers off.
Novelist Milton’s (The Godmother, 2018, etc.) political and ideological thriller is “ripped from the headlines” and should come with a trigger warning for Trump followers.
The book starts off with a bang, literally. Elsa Romero and Karl Reinholdt are facing off at a demonstration for immigrants’ rights. Her sign reads “LOVE WILL PREVAIL”; his, “MAKE AMERICA WHITE AGAIN.” A shot rings out, and the gun lands at Karl’s feet. Instinctively he picks it up. But Elsa knows that Karl didn’t fire the fatal shot and tells the police so. Thus begins what may be called “The Salvation of Karl Reinholdt.” Karl fell in with the “alt-right” after the factory that supported the town of Freiburg, Ohio, shut down. He lost his job there, and his parents saw their pensions halved. Enraged and depressed, he was eventually persuaded to blame immigrants. Elsa and her friend and mentor, Sister Solana, are both immigrants from the Dominican Republic. Elsa takes Karl in. They begin to trust one another, and ever so slowly, Elsa deprograms him, so to speak. Let it be said that Milton’s heart is in the right place. We are happy to cheer Elsa and Karl on. But it’s rather clear from the start that Karl will be saved, that he is at heart a decent guy and not a racist. Rather, he is an economically displaced white guy desperate to lay blame for how the traditional life he trusted could have come crashing down this way. In fact, one could argue that Milton has made up too easy a case: Karl isn’t the scary true believer who will eventually blow up a mosque or torch a black church. And the scary confrontation with the real killer has a whiff of deus ex machina about it. But these quibbles aside, Milton does a conscientious job of dramatizing the arguments, drawing Elsa and Karl as real people in conflict, and nicely pacing the conversion.
A worthwhile read despite a simplification that might put some readers off.Pub Date: April 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73206-342-6
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Nepperhan Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
There’s little suspense in a novel that’s most notable for its heavy-handed treatment of race.
There are murders in this Mississippi melodrama, but pay them no mind; its core is the brief friendship of two boys, one black, one white.
Larry Ott has been ostracized by the small town of Chabot for 25 years. Back in 1982, the white high-school student took his neighbor Cindy Walker out on a date. She was never seen again. The town assumed Larry had killed her, so though no body was found, no charges brought, Larry was punished. When the time came for Larry, a mechanic, to inherit his father’s shop, he had no customers. He survived by selling off parcels of the family’s woods to the timber company. Now, in 2007, another disappearance: the daughter of the company owner. While we’re absorbing this, a masked intruder shoots Larry on his porch. He survives, thanks to quick thinking by his erstwhile friend Silas Jones, a black man and the town’s only cop. Silas has been having a busy day: finding the decomposing body of a local drug dealer (not heard of again), removing a rattlesnake from a mailbox. These dramas share space with frequent flashbacks to the childhood of Larry and Silas. The result is a sluggish story, a surprise after Franklin’s two hell-for-leather historicals (Smonk, 2006, etc.). Silas and his mother once lived in a hunting cabin in the Ott woods. Larry taught Silas how to hunt and fish until a racial slur ended their friendship. Turns out Silas was also involved in Cindy’s disappearance, though absolutely not as her killer. There’s no lack of mysteries here, and no lack of red flags either, but other mysteries—of character—go unexamined. Why hasn’t Larry, instead of living like a zombie all these years, just left town? And why has Silas, after bigger assignments elsewhere, returned home to a nothing job?
There’s little suspense in a novel that’s most notable for its heavy-handed treatment of race.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-059466-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
Book #1 (of four) of King's celebrated megabucks publishing contract—and it's King at his effusive near-best, with a long, ultra-violent, suspenseful story of a best-selling writer whose pseudonym comes to life and goes on a murderous rampage. As in Misery, King again fantasizes from his own writerly experience, creating as his hero Maine author Thad Beaumont—who, in addition to literary novels under his own name, has written four grisly best-sellers under the pen name of George Stark. Unlike King's own Richard Bachman pseudonym, though—to whom King claims "indebtedness" here, and who was laid to rest after exposure by a resourceful reporter—Stark takes on malignant flesh after Thad (staving off threatened exposure) kills him off by going public in People magazine. Rising from his mock grave pictured in the People spread, Stark beats to death a local Maine man—and draws the ire of subsidiary hero Sheriff Alan Pang-born. When Stark's fingerprints turn out to match Thad's, the writer becomes the law-man's prime suspect—until Stark's graphically detailed blood-riot in Manhattan, where he kills Thad's literary agent and everyone associated with his "death," convinces Pang-born that Thad is innocent. King enriches this mayhem with his usual psychological soundings (are the now telepathically linked Stark and Thad truly two halves of one whole?) and occult symbolism (in an effective borrowing from The Birds, millions of sparrows, "psychopomps," herald Stark's moves). But the strong accent here is on violent action, with matters reaching a ripping climax as Stark kidnaps Thad's family to force Thad to help him write one last novel—the writing of which will allow the crazed Stark, now decaying, to suck up Thad's life force. A potent, engrossing blend of occult and slasher horror, not as fully riveting or grandly ironic as Misery, but without the pomposities of much other recent King—It; The Tommy-knockers—and certainly slick and scary enough to make it the book to beat on the fall lists.
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 1989
ISBN: 0451167317
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1989
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